Springtime for Hitler

This spring, the exploration of Third Reich imagery reaches critical mass.Triumph of the Will, the infamous 1934 film made by Hitler's favorite propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, ends its month-long run in a Chelsea gallery this week. Jake and Dinos Chapman's Holocaust opus, titled Hellwhich turned the tables on the old atrocities with a swastika-shaped concentration-camp centerpiece and huge photos of small sculpted Nazis tumbling into mass gravesis still fresh in our minds from P.S.1. So is MacDermott and MacGough's installation at PHAG, whichreplete with pink triangles, swastikas, and other loaded symbolsused replicas of dandified Hitler portraits to memorialize gay victims of the Holocaust and link the lethal homophobia of the Third Reich to Nazi homoeroticism. And enough unnerving references to the Hitler years have cropped up in the work of other young artists lately to make one wonder what's provoking this.

Jewish Museum curator Norman Kleeblatt, who organized "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," the already controversial exhibition opening March 17 at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, 423-3200; also see Richard Goldstein's "Managing the Unmanageable," page 42), spotted the trend early. He observed that over the past half a dozen years, Nazi evil emerged as a shared iconography among artists who are a couple of generations removed from those awful times. His tightly focused show of recent works by 13 brave young artists from eight different countriesincluding Israel, Austria, Poland, and Germanypromises a serious exploration of this phenomenon. Himself the child of a family decimated by the Holocaust, he was also quick to notice that these artists were doing a disturbing about-face. As a catalog text notes, "They turned from what has become a standard focus on the often anonymous victims and instead stared directly at the perpetrators."

MacDermott and MacGough and the Chapman twins, along with David Levinthal and Art Spiegelman, are absent from the exhibition, which features newer and younger artists such as Alain Séchas, Mat Collishaw, Elke Krystufek, Tom Sachs, and Maciej Toporowicz, along with Scottish artist Christine Borland, whose sculpture-by-proxy invites us to imagine the face of Mengele, and Israeli artist Roee Rosen, who lures us into the mind of Eva Braun.

It also includes Polish artist Zbigniew Libera's LEGO Concentration Camp Set, which scandalized Poland a few years back, and Piotr Uklanski's The Nazis, an installation of 123 publicity photos of Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, Dirk Bogarde, Ralph Fiennes, and other actors playing Nazi officers in films, which caused an even bigger scandal in Poland last year. Exhibited in Warsaw at the national gallery, The Nazis provoked one Polish actorwho, pictured in Nazi regalia, was part of Uklanski's pieceto don the costume of an 18th-century Polish patriot and, with TV crew in tow, to destroy the offending image of himself with his prop-room sword. Media madness ensued. Further fueled by the appearance of Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture of the pope (felled by a meteorite) in the next exhibition, members of Poland's parliament, casting anti-Semitic slurs, demanded the museum director's resignation.

Exploring moral ambiguities and role reversals, testing the limits of taste, irony, and representation, the works in the Jewish Museum exhibition raise tough questions about the porous borders between impersonation and collusion, critique and collaboration, oppression and repression, sensationalism and exorcism, and radical evil and radical innocence. Conceptual art that seems to make light of the modern century's heaviest subject raises complicated issues while shattering taboos. Says a museum spokesperson: "We're not doing this to create controversy. If we wanted to do an exhibition to get lines around the block we would just do another Chagall or Pissarro show."

Never mind the impeccable venue. Never mind the Jewish Museum's careful context supporting this show, which will include introductory videos, lectures, panel discussion, films, probing catalog essays, and screenings of films such as The Night Porter and The Damned. Never mind that books, plays, and comedians (from Charlie Chaplin to Roberto Benigni) have been making light of Nazi villains for decades. People who vie for tickets to The Producers reach for their metaphorical revolvers when visual art is involvedart they haven't even looked at. And so once again, with knee-jerk righteousness, those who should know better are attacking a curator, a museum, and an exhibitionsight unseen. Is it "the inexorable complexity of ethics" or our homegrown version of aesthetic intolerance and blind prejudice? If there's anything we ought to have learned from the Nazi experiment, which besmirched the whole notion of the utopian dream, it's that you'd better watch out before you attempt to purify a culture, especially a culture in which evil, the E-word, is the hottest subject around.

"Marble Floors," a group of photo works in which the Belgian artist used salami, mortadella, and other cold cuts to re-create baroque and Islamic floor patterns. Done before Cloaca, they exude hammy perfection. (Levin)

Spring's rebels? The biggest Whitney Biennial since 1981, and hopefully the best, promises a whole bunch of new names, bold choices, and maverick works, not only throughout the museum but also in Central Park. (Levin)

Large Polaroids that isolate a deliberately unidentified body part, made by an artist who explores flesh and femininity with considerable wit. (Aletti)

'NEW YORK IS A FRIENDLY TOWN' March 13-May 17 Keith de Lellis, 47 East 68th Street, 327-1482

A quartet of shows about our town opens with this exhibition of Weegee photos from the '40s and '50s. The subjects range from Greenwich Village rent parties to Marilyn Monroe riding a circus elephant at Madison Square Garden; the style is fast, tough, and indelible. (Aletti)

LAYLAH ALIMarch 14-May 21 MOMA, 11 West 53rd Street, 708-9400

Peopled by a race of cartoony, green-headed victims and oppressors, who enact issues of color, class, and gender, her first artist's book is featured in MOMA's latest "Projects" show. (Levin)

Let's hope her latest life-size sculptureexploring life, death, and rebirthmanages to be as sweetly rebellious, as vulnerable, and as excruciatingly mortal as her earlier figures, which pissed yellow beads, shit long-line turds, and climbed the walls. (Levin)

This nicely timed exhibition includes photos and video loops of daily life in a country descending into chaos. They were made during the last years of Soviet rule and drawn from the archives of the Afghan Media Resource Center in Pakistan. (Aletti)

The photographer turns from the American landscape to global politics with photos taken at the tumultuous G8 protests in Genoa last year, accompanied by texts condensed from interviews with participants. (Aletti)

A survey of contemporary video art that originated at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art comes to Queens, crammed with single-channel and installation works by 42 unflinching artists from here and abroad who probe the common culture and push all the right buttons. Patty Chang, John Pilson, Phyllis Baldino, Kristin Lucas, Justine Kurland, Alix Pearlstein, William Pope.L, and Kiki Seror are among them. (Levin)

In this unconventional three-way collaboration titled "Lowland Lullaby," Rondinone's stainless steel floor with embedded speakers does double duty: It amplifies the voice of John Giorno reading his poem "There Was a Bad Tree," and it functions as a platform for Fischer's drawings and sculpture. (Levin)

Rossell's first installment of a project she calls "Ricas y Famosas" established her as the Tina Barney of Mexico's nouveaux riches; she returns to the scene of the kitsch with a series called "Third World Blondes." (Aletti)

Devlin, who showed her photos of antiseptic American death chambers here before Harald Szeeman chose them for the Venice Biennale, returns with another set of interior views, this time of what she calls the American "Pleasure Ground": discos, spas, beauty salons, sex clubs. (Aletti)

Laughlin's most personal photoshis hauntingly surreal, "metaphysical" pictures from the '40sare nearly all accompanied by his interpretive and opinionated descriptive texts. (Aletti)

NEO RAUCHApril 5-May 4 David Zwirner, 43 Greene Street, 966-9074

The second solo show here of this German painter's vintage Eastern-bloc imagery, which is so over-the-top suave and hyper-stylized that it flips into a new kind of awkward innuendo and neo-existential rawness. (Levin)

She won the 2000 Hugo Boss award, trumping several better known contenders. Now this smart Slovenian artist, whose wayward architectural sculpture is inspired by shantytown ingenu-ity, has her first New York gallery solo. (Levin)

"The Road to Hell Less Traveled," new work making use of horror-film imagery, heavy metal music, and scary trees, plus a ghost story read aloud on April 20. "In short," says the idiosyncratic artist, "it's a clean exhibition about messy situations." (Levin)

The Austrian Cultural Forum boldly opens on April 18 with "A Long Night of Contemporary Music" and no show at allthe better to appreciate Austrian-born architect Raimund Abraham's striking new building. The first exhibition, an immersive hardcore electronica environment by Austrian artists Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich, a/k/a Granular Synthesis, opens the next day. (Levin)

Deborah Kass, whose own work rubs up against Andy Warhol's ego, curates a show of other artists who've created alter egos. They range from Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, and John Kelly to Delia Brown, Guy Richards Smit, Hiroshi Sunairi, and Nikki Lee. (Levin)

Video installations and photographs by the young Polish artist who represented Poland at the 1999 Venice Biennale with a controversial Bathhouse video installation that she made with hidden cameras, disguised as a man. (Levin)

This ambitious survey, organized by critic Max Kozloff, gathers 20th-century images of New York by a broad range of important photographers, many of them Jewish. With a focus on street work, the show highlights Arbus, Levitt, Hine, Model, Stieglitz, Strand, and William Klein. (Aletti)

TINA BARNEY May 1-June 10 Janet Borden, 560 Broadway, 431-0166

Barney brings her sharp eye for style and class to England; this series of big new color photos is the welcome result. (Aletti)

The photographer, famous for his super-iconic work with scale-model cowboys, Nazis, Barbies, and bondage babes, has turned to eroticized and customized female figures in G-strings and high heels for this recent series, making its U.S. debut here. (Aletti)

This French artist makes photographs of the interiors of abandoned buildings that he's transformed through paint into cartographical trompe l'oeil pieces. Viewed from a certain perspective, each space appears to be superimposed with a large contour map. (Aletti)

In what promises to be a smartly provocative juxtaposition, this show combines Lewis Hine's great muckraking images of child laborers with contemporaneous turn-of-the-century work by members of the Photo Secession, which shows children of privilege in an idealized light. (Aletti)

FISCHERSPOONERMay 8-31 Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster Street, 343-7300

Sweetness, a film by this hot performance group, plus live performances on May 9, 10, and 11. (Levin)

Two entirely new three-screen projections, excerpted from the Finnish film- and video-maker's new feature-length The Present. Her current Helsinki retrospective goes to London's Tate Modern in June. (Levin)

This show of big color photos that further Carucci's probing investigation of intimacy, both with her immediate family and her own body, celebrates the publication of the artist's first book, Closer. (Aletti)

"Live Forever," a user-friendly environment with karaoke capsules by this renegade feminist from Korea, whose work went wild after her "Projects" installation at MOMAwhich included sequined dead fishwas more than staff nostrils could bear. (Levin)